Turbonomic Announces Version 5.9, Adds Support for Hybrid Cloud

Today Turbonomic announced a new release of their autonomic management suite, version 5.9. The new version adds new capabilities, expanding their automated management into hybrid cloud environments, as well as a number of performance enhancements.

With this release, Turbonomic is furthering their mission: to enable their customers to automate and control any workload, on any infrastructure, any time, and any place.

What’s New in 5.9

I’ll summarize what I see as the key new things Turbonomic has added in version 5.9.

Support for Hybrid Cloud

Version 5.9 allows customers to manage, control, and automate workloads in Hybrid Cloud environments. This includes automated migration of those workloads from on-site infrastructure to public cloud, from one public cloud provider to another, and from public cloud back on-site. These migrations can be triggered by a need for more resources, scaling back on resources needed, or because running the workload in the different environment would be more cost-effective — all based upon real-time analytics of the workloads’ actual resource demands.

As of this writing, the public cloud providers supported by Turbonomic are:

Amazon AWS

Microsoft Azure

IBM SoftLayer

Performance Improvements

Turbonomic has improved the performance of their analytics engines, allowing reports and analyses to be run far more quickly. As tested in actual customer implementations, Turbonomic analysis can be run against:

20,000 entities in 2 minutes

50,000 entities in 5 minutes

100,000 entities in 9 minutes

This is a significant performance increase over version 5.8, allowing for better real-time automation.

Moving to HTML5

As we’re seeing across the industry, more vendors are moving their software, interfaces, and management consoles away from Java or Flash, and moving to HTML5, allowing for greater portability with fewer dependancies.

Turbonomic version 5.8 was Flash-based, and that legacy remains. Turbonomic is now running in a “dual-mode”. The majority of 5.9’s “core” functionality is also done in Flash, while the new Hybrid Cloud portions of Turbonomic are built with HTML5.

Turbonomic is committed to HTML5 as the future, and has plans to be fully-HTML5 by the end of 2017.

Availability

Turbonomic 5.9 is available for download now.

GeekFluent’s Thoughts

I’m a long-time fan of Turbonomic (from back in the VMTurbo days), and it’s great to see this expansion of their capabilities.

More organizations are looking to take advantage of public and hybrid infrastructures, so this release is very timely.

Larger organizations are looking to use multiple cloud providers — whether out of fear of vendor lock-in, a desire for improved availability, or to take advantage of pricing differences — so support for multiple public cloud providers is key.

Most of the cost savings that Turbonomic can give customers in the public cloud is due to improving sizing and template usage. Most public clouds provide template-based virtual machines and then charge based upon the resources allocated. Typically, the next-larger template allocates twice the resources of the smaller size. Due to the lack of fine granularity, a small miscalculation in sizing can cause a large cost overhead.

I cant help but notice that my favorite cloud provider is not among those currently supported by Turbonomic. I believe this is for two reasons:

Today, AWS and Azure are the most-used public cloud providers, so if you can only support a limited number of providers initially, they’re a good choice to pick.

Due to Virtustream’s MircoVM approach to resource metering, customers pay for only the resources they’re actually using — not resources allocated. As such, the sizing concerns that Turbonomic addresses aren’t present with Virtustream.(I’ll be posting about the MicroVM model and how it works in the near future.)